Daisy Dickinson

Daisy Dickinson

Daisy Dickinson is a London-based Director/Visual Artist, specialising in experimental short films, music videos and visual performances. Her medium is video and it stretches to live visuals, video installation and stop motion animation. She is one half of audio/visual collaboration ‘Adrena Adrena’ with ex-Boredom’s drummer E-da Kazuhisa and is currently working as a visual addition to 90s post-rock group Seefeel. Dickinson’s visuals have been described as ‘magmatic and sulphurous, cosmological and transcendental, drawing attention to the wonder of the earth and our sensuality on it’

Awards/ Nominations:

Official Selection for London Short Film Festival 2017, UK

Official Selection for Delete TV Film Festival, 2017, UK

Official Selection Zoom Zblizenia Film Festival 2017, POLAND

Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016, UK

Official Selection New York International Film Festival 2016, USA

Official Selection for BAFTA Qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2016, UK

Official Selection Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival 2016, UK

Reviews:

"The centre of the stage was taken up by projections which, always simple and often semi-abstract, never stole the limelight from the music. It was more like watching a trio, just one at work on different senses to the others. Pretty soon you weren't taking in the sights and sounds as separate elements at all, but hand been induced into a kind of synaesthesia. And if that seems like we're reverting to Sixties terminology like 'trip' we might as well go with it.... it felt like a trip (man), like being taken through some other reality then dumped back in ours at the end."

The act is visually intriguing before even starting, with a giant white balloon hanging above Kazuhisa’s drum kit. This planet-like screen has orbited various music and film festivals throughout 2016 and is accompanied with a DVD release featuring many of the images of a drum falling down a rocky river that were on show here.

For this particular performance the ball shimmers between galactic clouds, earthly terrains, volcanic heat, and glacial iciness. The set begins nocturnal and dense, the balloon a particularly luminescent moon, but as the initial sludginess of Kazuhisa’s drumming floats through into a more electronica and jazzy percussive splash, Dickinson’s projections become magmatic and sulphurous, psychedelically cosmological, and thawed with ice. The music and visuals don’t so much flow as spin and expand like the galaxies, but as the performance comes to its close, the aforementioned images of drums rolling down an English countryside rocky stream emanate along with accompanying percussive downpours.

The performance is both elemental and epic, drawing you into its transcendental rhythmic and visual orbit before landing you in the grounded and earthly realm of the physical drum hitting the rocks in the splash of a river, drawing attention to the wonder of the earth and our sensuality on it. Undoubtedly the visual aspect is preeminent here, which is not to say that the audio is submissive, but more to say that its purpose is to accentuate the terrains and cosmologies of the shifting visual globe. Indeed the crescendos, jilts, spaces and crashes of the drumming weave into the visual to elevate and embolden the overall grandiosity of the collaboration.